“COTS” – Commercial off the shelf
“COTS” – Government off the shelf
Ok, not all the posts here are gems, but it is also my personal memory bank 🙂

“COTS” – Commercial off the shelf
“COTS” – Government off the shelf
Ok, not all the posts here are gems, but it is also my personal memory bank 🙂
I want to start posting some of the cool things I am figuring out but so far I haven’t because I can’t really figure out how to organize it.
One area that I have immersed myself into is the many diverse groups who are doing work promoting government openness and transparency by, among many other things, creating the technical bridges to allow information that is already being collected to be more easily accessible. There are many of them, and one of them is the Sunlight Foundation. They are doing some really cool work, both themselves, and sponsoring and granting others who share their goals.
Wow what a long wind-up.
Anyway, in digging deeply into their APIs and datasets I decided to learn by doing and created a Ruby Gem called govsdk with the following goals:
Version 0.0.1 of the GovSdk GEM (0.0.1 — get the idea?) is implemented and available at GovSdk. Check it out, but expect it to change because this is still quite embryonic.